For my CEO Series I interview CEOs and founders of start-ups in IT Infrastructure, SAAS, Fintech, Mobile and eCommerce. Their views are shared on my blog.

Recently I had the great honor to speak with John W. Thompson. It is hard to introduce such a heavyweight, so I will start by listing a few of the most notable positions he occupies. His positions, besides being impressive – are relevant to understand the viewpoints he holds and voiced during the interview.

After a long career at IBM where he held various executive positions, John W. Thompson became CEO at Symantec, which he helped build to a $6 billion company over a period of 10 years. In 2009, he was contender to be secretary of the Department of Commerce.

In 2009 he became involved with Virtual Instruments (VI) as an investor and became CEO of VI in 2010. Besides this demanding role, in February of this year John W. Thompson was famously appointed Chairman of the Board at Microsoft, replacing Bill Gates. In this function he was involved in replacing former CEO Steve Ballmer with the current CEO Satya Nadella. Here is a link to his appointment speech.

Additionally, PernixData, Liquid Robotics, Domo and Seagate are among the companies where John holds advisory positions. [Read more…]

As a part of my CEO series, I interview CEOs of innovative companies in the fields of Storage, Virtualization and Networking.

Measuring how your application is performing is not a straightforward task. Many enterprises have multiple locations, work with Cloudbased applications and have end users stationed in different parts of the world.

With the future of IT Infrastucture trending toward more interconnectedness and external dependencies, it becomes both increasing difficult and increasingly important to know how your application is performing.

ThousandEyes created a Network performance measurement tool that is ready for modern Cloud application environments. They are able to collect data inside your enterprise environment and data from various probing points on the internet, to tell you exactly how your application is performing.

They couple this to a very intuitive interface, allowing customers and suppliers alike to monitor performance of their applications all over the planet.

Introduction to CloudPhysics

A company’s IT Infrastructure is crucial to its survival and succes, which is why most companies invest heavily in their IT Infrastructure to reduce risk and increase performance.

Despite these investments, the complex and dynamic nature of IT Infrastructure environments means that most companies do not have a complete picture of their IT infrastructure and the workloads that run on it. There is a risk and performance penalty associated with this.

The risk lies in making changes to your largely unknown environment; like adding resources, adding workloads and changing policies. These can have unpredictable effects that jeopardize the stability of your IT Infrastructure. To mitigate this risk, companies create separate Test & Development infrastructures to test new configurations. However these are costly and time-consuming, plus some real-world scenarios cannot easily be replicated.

The performance penalty arises from the fact that an unknown IT Infrastructure can not use its resources optimally.

Enter CloudPhysics. They have developed a non-disruptive data collection technique for VMware vSphere environments where data about the IT Infrastructure and the workloads that run on it are collected.[Read more…]